Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Cannonball! (1976)

Despite an inconsistent
tone that wobbles between action, comedy, drama, and social satire, the
car-race flick Cannonball! is periodically
entertaining. As cowritten and directed by Paul Bartel—whose previous film, Death Race 2000 (1975), provided a more
extreme take on similar material—the picture tries to capture the chaotic fun
of the real-life Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, an
illegal trek from New York to L.A. that attracted speed-limit-averse rebels for
several years in the ‘70s. (In Cannonball!,
the race is reversed, starting in Santa Monica and ending in Manhattan.)
Bearing all the hallmarks of a Roger Corman enterprise (the picture was
distributed by Corman’s company, New World), Cannonball! has a strong sadistic streak, seeing as how the plot is
riddled with beatings, explosions, murders, and, of course, myriad car crashes.
Yet while Death Race 2000 employed a
body count to make a sardonic point, Cannonball!
offers destruction for destruction’s sake. Shallow characterizations exacerbate
the tonal variations, so the whole thing ends up feeling pointless. That said,
Bartel and his collaborators achieve the desired frenetic pace, some of the
vignettes are amusingly strange, and the movie boasts a colorful cast of
B-movie stalwarts.

David Carradine, who also starred in Death Race 2000, stars as Coy “Cannonball” Buckman, a onetime top
racer who landed in prison following a car wreck that left a passenger dead.
Eager for redemption—and the race’s $100,000 prize—Coy enters the competition alongside
such peculiar characters as Perman Waters (Gerrit Graham), a country singer who
tries to conduct live broadcasts while riding in a car driven by maniacal
redneck Cade Redman (Bill McKinney); Sandy Harris (Mary Woronov), leader of a
trio of sexpots who use their wiles to get out of speeding tickets; Terry
McMillan (Carl Gottlieb), a suburban dad who has his car flown cross-country in
a brazen attempt to steal the first-place prize; and Wolf Messer (James Keach),
a German racing champ determined to smite his American counterparts. Some
racers play fair, while others employ sabotage, trickery, and violence.

Carradine is appealing, even if his martial-arts scenes seem a bit out of
place, while Bartel (who also acts in the picture), Graham, McKinney, and Dick
Miller give funny supporting turns. Thanks to its abundance of characters and
events, Cannonball! is never boring,
per se, but it’s also never especially engaging. Additionally, much of the
picture’s novelty value—at least for contemporary viewers—relates to cinematic
trivia. Cannonball! was the first of
four pictures inspired by the real-life Cannonball race, since it was followed
by The Gumball Rally (also released
in 1976), The Cannonball Run (1981), and
Cannonball Run II (1984). Providing
more fodder for movie nerds, Bartel cast several noteworthy figures in cameo
roles, including Sylvester Stallone (another holdover from Death Race 2000), Corman, and directors Allan Arkush, Joe Dante,
and Martin Scorsese.